Monday, April 19, 2010

Charles Gaines KOs Chinese basketball player

Uh, this will have implications.

Any half-intelligent foreigner who's been in China for any length of time knows it's a bad idea to pick a fight against a Chinese person in this country, for reasons we won't get into at the moment. (Let's just say in my Cormac McCarthy-worship days I was witness to more than a couple fights where foreigners most definitely did not come out okay.)

The synopsis: in the closing moments of Game 2 of the Chinese Basketball Association finals on Sunday, Guangdong's Du Feng gets tangled underneath the basket with Xinjiang's Gaines, a Southern Mississippi standout in the early naughts who was briefly on the San Antonio Spurs' roster. Du appears to butt heads with Gaines; Gaines responds by roundhousing Du. Ten-count, commence.

The Guangdong crowd, as you can imagine, gets into a tizzy as people wonder if Du is, as the picture above suggests, dead. (Don't worry, he survives -- a light concussion at worse.) If you click on that Sina link, the fourth video in the queue shows Gaines leaving the arena later that night surrounded by about 150 police officers. I'm only slightly exaggerating.

Here's CBAChina's coverage of the incident (throw that into Google Translate if you'd like). At the end of that article is a poll asking, "Charles's punch of Du Feng roused on-court chaos, who's responsible?" The choices:

a) Charles -- looking forward to CBA's punishmentb) Fans, though hitting people is uncalled forc) Referees, who didn't do a good job controlling the gamed) Home organizers, whose inadequate security measures allowed disaster to happen

"Du Feng" was not an option. Can you guess who won with 69.7 percent of the vote? (I'll give you a hint: you don't need a hint.)

CBA: Where Shit Happens.

POSTSCRIPT: If you care, Guangdong, behind former Laker starter Smush Parker (26 points, 10 rebounds, 7 assists) and David Harrison (17 points, 8 rebounds, 7 blocks), won the game 95-90 and now leads the best-of-seven series 2-0. The series now shifts to Xinjiang, a place that most recently made Western headlines due to this.

UPDATE, 4/20: It's a best-of-seven series, not five as I'd earlier had it (correction appended). And let the debate begin on whether Du Feng "faked" any part of the incident (it does appear that Charles used an open palm, which makes the incident slightly less life-threatening than the Kermit Washington-Rudy Tomjanovich thing in 1977).